Tonight it was an AL game, Detroit at New York. He thought Detroit looked good for the Series. He thought it would be a Detroit/Chicago Series, and his money was on Detroit.
The Tigers would take the Cubs, and then Kindle would pack up his possessions and move on.
* * *
He spent that night at the hospital, but he wasn’t sick enough to stay longer and he didn’t intend to. It was a charmless place at best. At the same time, it seemed pointless to move back to his cabin. He could get all the isolation he wanted much closer to town.
In the morning he phoned the local realty office. No one answered, but Kindle was ready for that. He knew a guy who worked there, or used to, a guy named Ira who sometimes hired his boat for fishing trips. Kindle reached him at home. Ira’s voice had the detached, bemused quality Kindle had come to expect from a Contactee. Kindle identified himself and came to the point: “Just a question, Ira, seeing as you’re in the business: Are houses free?”
“What do you mean… you want to buy a house?”
“Nope. I just want one. Yesterday I wanted a radio rig and I got one for free. Can I have a house?”
There was a pause. “Well.” Thoughtful. “I know of some empty properties. If you move in, I don’t suppose anybody will mind.”
“You’re shittin’ me!” Kindle couldn’t contain himself.
“Beg pardon?”
“Christ, you’re serious! I can move into any fuckin’ house?”
“Any empty one, I suppose.”
He recalled Joey Commoner’s remark about an antenna. “I want a house on a hill. No obstructions. Nice view all around.”
“Ocean view?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“I can give you a few addresses.…” Kindle fumbled for his pen.
* * *
He spent the next day looking at properties. By mid-afternoon he’d picked one out: A two-bedroom frame house in Delmar Estates, a mildly upscale part of town, overlooking Buchanan and a northerly piece of the bay. The house was empty and unfurnished.
He moved in his single piece of property—the radio transceiver, still boxed. He put it in the middle of the living room floor.
The house had an empty-house smell. He guessed the broadloom had been cleaned before the property went on the market. Maybe the walls had been painted. He breathed in, breathed out.
He had never lived in such a place and never really wanted to… but he guessed a month or so here might be tolerable. Although, at the moment, there was nothing to sit on but the floor.
He drove to the Sears at the nearest mall and found the doors standing open but no one on duty at the cashiers’ stations. What else? He realized with some startlement that he could equip the house with any furniture he happened to like, price being no object. He’d always kind of admired these imitation-leather sofas, for instance. He tried one out, right there in the deserted Home Furnishings department. It was like sitting on a stuffed lizard. Sumptuous but probably sticky in hot weather.
But this was all academic—there was no way he could transport any of this stuff, not at the moment, not without grinding his bad leg down to bloody splinters. He sighed and moved on to the patio furniture. Two folding chairs and a chaise lounge, just about his speed. He tucked them under his arm and carried them to the car.
He went back for fresh clothes—a pair of jeans and an armload of cotton T-shirts and underwear.
It had been a long day and he was beginning to tire, but he made a second stop at the A P, where he picked up canned food, cold cuts, a couple of loaves of bread. The house was equipped with a refrigerator and stove… but hang on, was the electricity working? It hadn’t occurred to him to check the lights. He supposed he could phone the power company. If the phone was connected. If there was a phone. Okay, one more stop, back to the mall to pick up a touchtone telephone.
It was nearly dusk by the time he arrived back at the house.
Electricity, it turned out, wasn’t a problem. The refrigerator was humming vigorously. He switched on the kitchen lights and began putting away the food.
He noticed the wire shelves in the refrigerator were barely cool, and he frowned and checked the freezer. No frost. Not even a trace. Was that significant? Maybe it was a frost-free unit; Kindle had heard of such appliances, though he had never owned one.
But the refrigerator was humming like a son of a bitch. When he was here earlier… had he noticed that sound?
Maybe not.
Maybe, this afternoon, the electricity hadn’t been turned on. He plugged in the phone and called Ira. “Ira, I found a place.”
“I know,” Ira said cheerfully. “Up on Delmar. I was the listed agent on that property, by the way. Good view. I hope you’ll be happy there.”
“Pardon me, Ira, but how the fuck do you know where I picked to live?”
There was a pause. “The neighbors saw you leave some belongings. We assumed you were moving in.”
“What, you talked to the neighbors?”
“Well. In a way.”
By voodoo telegraph, in other words. “So tell me… did the neighbors also talk to the power company?”
“Well, Tom. Everybody more or less talks to everybody.”
“Well, Ira, doesn’t that more or less scare the shit out of you?”
“No. But I apologize if we alarmed you.”
“Think nothing of it.” He put the phone down in a hurry. Unfolded a chair and sat in it.
He’d forgotten to pick up a TV set. Was there a game on tonight? He couldn’t remember.
Kindle went to the kitchen, where the light was brighter, and unpacked the transceiver. Ungainly object. He tried to read the manual, but it was written in some language only theoretically English. “Do not allow to contact with moisture or heavily wet.” Words to live by.
He guessed Joey Commoner would be able to figure it out.
* * *
November was rainy; he postponed the chore of erecting an antenna. The ache in his leg retreated some. He began stocking up on groceries, beginning to suspect that Mart’s fears about the food supply were well-founded. The staples were still being trucked in, but luxury items had begun to disappear from the shelves. He stockpiled some of those, too. He felt like making a trophy list. Successfully hunted down in Buchanan, Oregon : Last bag of Oreos. Last bottle of gourmet popcorn.
He ferried down some items from his cabin, mainly tools and books. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire had been sitting where he left it last August and was a little musty, since he’d left the windows open, but still readable. A trudge through Gibbon might not be too bad, given all this rainy cool weather. Then on to Madame Bovary.
The Tigers took the American League pennant late that month.
He called Joey when the skies cleared for a couple of days.
“Been waiting to hear from you,” Joey complained. “I got a lot of tower parts from Radio Shack. And a beam antenna from Causgrove’s. But you weren’t at the hospital.”
Kindle gave the kid his new address. “You can transport all that?”
“Took a van out of the lot at Harbor Ford.”
Must do that myself one of these days, Kindle thought. “Are we talking hard physical labor here?”
“Some,” Joey said. “Bring beer,” Kindle said. “You got it.”
* * *
Kindle had worked erecting TV towers back in the sixties, and he remembered enough of that experience to temper Joey’s recklessness. He used a power drill with a masonry bit to anchor the antenna base in a concrete trailer pad in front of the house. He guyed the tower as it went up, extra guys on the first ten feet so Joey wouldn’t come plummeting down. Probably Matt Wheeler would resent being called in on another broken leg. Would resent it even worse if he lost one of his one in ten thousand—even if it was Joey Commoner.
They had the tower stabilized and the antenna installed by dusk. Joey did all the climbing, in deference to Kindle’s leg, a nice thought, or his age, which was ins
ulting; he was careful not to ask.
Joey stood back from his work. “This ought to give us good access to the twenty-meter band, which I guess would be the busiest band under the circumstances, though who knows?”
“I sure as hell don’t.”
Joey had taken off his shirt during the final guying of the tower. As they entered the house, Kindle read the tattoo on his right bicep. Neat blue letters.
WORTHLESS, it said.
“You believe that?” Kindle asked.
Joey shrugged his shirt back on and began fiddling with the back of the transceiver. Kindle cracked a beer, waiting for an answer that didn’t come. This would have been a good time to order in a pizza, he thought, except nobody delivered anymore. He wondered who in Buchanan had eaten the last delivery pizza.
He persisted, “It just seems like a strange thing to write on yourself.”
Joey put his head up from behind the transceiver. “Since when do you give a shit?”
“Don’t get hostile.” Anyway, Kindle’s attention had refocused on the dinner problem. “Maybe I could cook us up some hamburgers on that Jenn-Air in the kitchen.…”
“Cook whatever you want. Fuck!” Joey had jammed a screwdriver into the palm of his hand. He added some other words.
“Shouldn’t have written, ‘worthless,’ ” Kindle said. “Should have written, ‘Bad tempered little SOB.’ ”
“Fuck off,” Joey said. “I thought you liked to do electronics.”
Joey stood up. What was that on his shirt—a skull? Skull and roses? “It’s too many words.”
“Eh?”
“’Bad-tempered little SOB.’ Would have hurt too much.”
“Kid has a sense of humor,” Kindle said.
* * *
He cooked up hamburgers the way he liked them, with a startling amount of chili worked into the ground beef, an acquired taste, perhaps, but Joey just ladled on the ketchup and forged ahead. Kindle asked, “When do we power up?”
“I guess after we eat.”
“Might not be anything to hear.”
Joey shrugged. He had absolutely mastered that gesture, Kindle thought. He had a vocabulary of shrugs.
Kindle said, “If it’s one in ten thousand, how many of those are hams or have the sense to rig up a radio? I read a statistic in one of those library books. Maybe one out of six hundred adult Americans has a valid amateur license. So what does that come to after Contact? Fifty people in the continental U.S.?”
“How should I know?”
“Well, we don’t know. But it can’t be very many. And how many of those are on the air?”
“More at night,” Joey said. “Reception’s supposed to be better at night.”
“Even so. Some of them are bound to be out of range or at the wrong angle to the antenna or some damn thing. Some of them maybe tried and gave up. We might not hear a blessed word.”
“Might not,” Joey said.
“What, you don’t give a shit?”
Joey seemed to ponder the question. “I want to work the transceiver,” he said finally. “You need somebody to talk to.”
“So as far as you’re concerned, this isn’t about saving the world.”
“Is that what you think?”
“No,” he admitted. “It’s maybe what Matt Wheeler thinks.”
“Stupid idea,” Joey said. “Is it?”
“Everybody’s gone already. I mean they’re still here, but they’re gone. Some of us just got left behind. We can’t do anything about it.”
“Help ourselves, maybe.”
“If we were that smart, we would have gone to heaven like everybody else. There’s a reason we got left here. All the important people are gone, and we’re still here because basically… because we’re…”
“What?”
Joey smiled. “Worthless.”
* * *
Joey switched on the radio, but the twenty-meter band was empty. All that static gave Kindle a chilly feeling. Little crackles of who knows what—interstellar radiation, cosmic noise, like rain on a rooftop, faint as memory. It was like listening to the restless sleep of the world.
It wasn’t just Buchanan that had gone strange, it was the entire planet. You could know that—he had known it for months—and still not feel it. But he felt it now, listening to the radio hiss like waves on an empty beach.
This was the silence of Detroit and Chicago, the silence of Washington, the silence of Ceylon and Baghdad and Peking and London.
We must have been the most talkative species for light-years around, Kindle thought, but tonight the Earth was as still as an empty church.
He heard what he thought was a snatch of voices amidst the static… but when Joey tuned back, there was nothing. “Try putting out a call,” Kindle suggested.
Joey took up the microphone. He cleared his throat. “Calling CQ,” he said, then covered the mike with his hand. “I feel like an asshole!”
“I expect everybody does the first time. Carry on.”
“Calling CQ. This is—” He covered the microphone again. “We don’t have a call number.”
“Just say your name, for Christ’s sake! Say we’re in Oregon.”
“CQ, this is Joseph Commoner in Buchanan, Oregon, calling CQ.”
Joseph?
“CQ, if anybody can hear me, calling CQ.”
* * *
Kindle sat through a couple of hours of this, then told Joey he was going to bed. “When you get tired you can crash on the chaise lounge if you want to.”
Not that Joey showed any sign of wanting to sleep. He continued to patrol the twenty-meter band with an obsessive glaze in his eyes.
Kindle brushed his teeth and stretched out on a mattress he had ferried here from the mall. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of Joey calling CQ in the next room.
He thought about the antenna, about Joey’s radio waves zooming off into the dark night. Seek you, seek you.
Just the idea of it gave him the lonely shivers.
* * *
Kindle got up at dawn. Joey, curled on the lawn recliner in the living room, slept till noon. When he woke he came into the kitchen looking smug.
“Any luck last night?” Kindle asked.
“I talked to a couple of people,” Joey said, and checked out Kindle’s reaction with a sideways glance.
“No shit?” Kindle said. “Who?”
“A guy, a ham, in Toronto. That’s in Canada, right?”
“Last time I looked at a map it was. What’s happening in Toronto?”
“He says the situation is about the same as here. We’re supposed to talk again tonight. Ask him yourself. And another guy, down in Georgia.”
“Southerner, huh?”
“Well, he’s travelling around,” Joey said. “He’s an Army Colonel. Name of Tyler.”
* * *
Some nights later, Kindle watched the final game of the World Series on his color TV.
It was a Tigers/Cubs series, as he’d predicted. The game was broadcast without narrative, which gave it an eerie atmosphere. The only sound was the crack of the bat, the murmur (not a roar) of a sparse crowd.
All these games had been close. Pitchers’ games, Kindle thought. Scientific. Mistakes were few and counted for much: If a breaking ball stayed up and over the plate, it was bound for glory.
Detroit took the game 2-1 in the eleventh inning, winning the series.
Last at bat for the Boys of Summer.
The final score rode up the screen… then, suddenly, there was static.
Nothing on TV tonight, Kindle thought. Nothing on TV tonight ever again.
He phoned Matt Wheeler and told him he’d stay till Christmas.
Chapter 20
Christmas
Matt Wheeler saw less of his daughter Rachel as winter settled in. She was out of the house much of the time. She seldom told him where she was going or where she slept at night. Matt seldom asked.
They talked occasionally. He appreciated the
effort she made, but increasingly it was dialogue across an invisible wall.
“Daddy,” she told him, “you have to talk to the Helper.”
He thought: Talk to it? What—that statue?
The Helper had stood in the City Hall Turnaround like a piece of grim abstract sculpture for weeks now. It neither moved nor spoke. “If you talk to it,” Rachel said, “it’ll talk back.”
“That’s… difficult to believe.”
“You have to talk to it,” Rachel said. “It can tell you things I can’t, and it’ll be here when I’m gone. That’s what it’s for.”
* * *
The rain was nearly constant now. On the day he closed the hospital, the second of December, Matt posted a sign at the Emergency entrance. His name and phone number were written in red letters under a waterproof plastic sheath. The number would reach him at home or in his car, as long as the telephone and local cellular system survived. He was considering the possibility of fitting a mobile medical unit in a hospital ambulance, or trying to locate the hospital’s own rural treatment unit, abandoned somewhere after Contact. But there didn’t seem to be a pressing need. The hospital’s facilities were intact if he should need them… though he could foresee a time when the town would exhaust its supply of drugs, of sterile needles—of doctors, perhaps.
On his way home, thinking about what Rachel had said, he stopped at the City Hall Turnaround.
The center of this traffic circle had been developed as a park, planted with grass and equipped with a water fountain and a plaque commemorating the town’s incorporation. Much of Willy’s IWW battle had been fought on this circle of alkaline soil.
The Harvest Page 21